A personal correspondent recently wrote me to suggest that it is unwise and wrong to take umbrage at David Letterman’s tasteless and unfunny joke about Bristol Paiin. Even if the joke was egregious, my correspondent wrote, we should turn the other cheek and not engage in victimology, which is a tactic of the left and thus to be avoided.

I agree that claims of group victimhood are craven, but that is not what is happening in the present case. To call people to account when the have committed real offenses is the right and necessary thing to do if wa are to have anything like a decent society.

Letterman’s attack on Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s family and the notorous Playboy hate-f-ck article are exactly that, and they are just the latest in a long, long string of outrages intended to hurt and humiliate people on the right. They are straightforward, classic bullying tactics. To oppose such attacks is not to indulge in victimology. Victimology is a false claim that one should not be held responsible for one’s actions because of one’s supposedly underprivileged background.

That is obviously not the case here. No one is saying that Palin and other conservatives shouldn’t have to defend their policy positions and statements. On the contrary, they should welcome that, and from what I’ve seen, on the whole they do. But these continuous personal attacks and ever-flowing stream of venom against all of those to the right of Nancy Pelosi are meant to stop discussion. That’s wrong, and while it’s best for each of us to rise above the fray when an offense is done to us, those of us whose profession or avocation is to comment on public events should take up the issue and point out these rotten activities.

Certainly no one can actually justify Letterman’s joke. In a good society it would be seen as an outrage, and he would be tarred and feathered, and Sarah Palin’s husband would be thought entirely justified in giving him a sound thrashing. The fact that Sarah Palin is a politician does not justify everything anybody may say or do to her.

Letterman went far beyond the pale by personally attacking Palin’s family. An honorable man would not do that. Even the Mafia doesn’t do that.

As to the content of his so-called joke, some have defended Letterman by arguing that he is correct to accuse Mrs. Palin of hypocrisy in supporting a social conservative agenda when her daughter had an illegitimate child. That is false for at least two reasons.

One, those who have ever had any children who have grown to adulthood know very well that no parent has control over what adolescents do. No, not one. You can raise them perfectly well, and still at adolescence they are replaced by aliens and become intransigent monsters until they snap out of it in their early twenties. It’s a natural process, and no parent has any control over it.

Thus the willingness of Letterman’s defenders to blame the parents for Bristol’s foolish error (which is exactly what it was, something to be pitied, not condemned) is possible only because they either have not raised children to adulthood themselves or did not pay any attention to what was going on around them. Thus it shows their ignorance, not wisdom.

Two, the very fact that Mrs. Palin’s daughter had an illegitimate child could be taken as a very good reason for Palin to take up a social conservative agenda or increase her devotion to it. In fact, Bristol Palin herself has done exactly that, supporting the abstinence movement as a way of helping young people avoid the problems she encountered as a teen. Seeing that Mrs. Palin has experienced the sad consequences of our current moral climate, a concern on her part about social issues could be seen as quite laudable.

But only if one were being fair and not simply trying to bully the opposition into leaving the discussion.

That’s why this is an important and valid issue and merits continuing coverage.

—S. T. Karnick